The Mischief Makers E-Book

Elisabeth Gifford

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 413

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'AS COMPELLING AS ANY OF DU MAURIER'S OWN WORKS' SUNDAY TIMES She wrote her stories in his shadow. Now Daphne's past is catching up with her... In a beautiful house in the wilds of Cornwall, Daphne du Maurier is on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Tangled in a self-destructive love affair that threatens to unravel her marriage, she is also distracted by worry for the family friend whose shadow looms over her childhood: J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan. Daphne tries to escape into writing her new book, but the line between fiction and reality blurs dangerously when her own characters start manifesting before her eyes - in particular a woman called Rebecca who looks suspiciously like her husband's alluring ex-girlfriend. Daphne must confront the dark truth that lurks beneath the fantasy of Peter Pan and the secret life that has plagued her since she found fame. Unless she can solve these mysteries and reckon with who she truly is as an artist, her next great work may be lost to history . . . 'Fascinating' Elizabeth Buchan 'Elegant and immersive' Essie Fox 'Glorious' Jane Johnson

Leseprobe

Also by Elisabeth Gifford

Secrets of the Sea House

Return to Fourwinds

The Good Doctor of Warsaw

The Lost Lights of St Kilda

A Woman Made of Snow

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2024 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in 2025 by Corvus

Copyright © Elisabeth Gifford, 2024

The moral right of Elisabeth Gifford to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

Letters from the Daphne du Maurier archive at the University of Exeter quoted by permission of Christian Browning

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 984 5

Corvus

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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To Josh

Exceeding the boundaries is part of creativity.

Jung

PROLOGUE

MENABILLY CORNWALL 1947

Daphne lay in the dark, her heart still thumping. She’d been dreaming of Michael again as he and Rupert walked towards Sanford Pool, the long summer grass in the meadows brushing their feet, the murmur of the weir growing louder as they pass the blistered wooden sign with its black lettering: Beware. Danger of drowning. The sudden burst of a thrush from a hawthorn tree.

At the edge of the water, they strip down to their bathers. No sound from the halls and quads of Oxford can reach them here. One goes in first, she can’t see which, and the other follows, wading deeper until the meniscus of the pool laps their chins and their feet lift from the bottom, water splashing as they strike out to the middle – more of an effort for Michael who’s only recently learned to swim.

They pause, treading water. Around them, the pool is a mirror of sky ringed with upside-down trees. Moving closer, Rupert’s arm goes around Michael. Michael wraps both arms around Rupert. An intake of breath, the water churns, and they rise up, shoulders gleaming like fish leaping. A shout and they disappear under the water.

The stillness closes over them.

A minute, two minutes. A lifetime.

Gasping, she’d woken from the dream, the anguish of the news as fresh as ever. Please God, let it have been an accident. One boy with cramp, panicking, the other trying to save him. Don’t let it have been suicide.

But over twenty years had gone by since Michael died, and there were still no answers. Sanford Pool had had to be dragged – that odd detail of how one body had fallen from the other’s arms as they came up out of the water.

She groped for the alarm clock on the bedside table. Five o’clock. She put it back down on top of a book she’d been reading: How People Go Mad. Little chance of getting back to sleep now. She got up, pulled on Tommy’s old worsted dressing gown and belted it round her waist. Over at the window she pushed back the curtain. It was that brief, liminal moment before dawn, the rhododendrons a barely perceptible shade darker than the fading night air, their humped shapes rising in a ring around the lawns of Menabilly.

She leaned her head against the icy glass. How strange that the very thing Michael had so desperately feared as a child should come to pass. He had always been terrified of water. Refused to learn to swim for years. On a family holiday when she was about five and Michael eleven, she’d been woken up several times at night by the sound of him shouting. Gone out of her room to find him at the top of the stairs, a small figure in a white nightgown waving an imaginary sword at whatever it was that sought to pull him under the water. Uncle Jim would be there, standing behind him in the shadows. Uncle Jim always sat with Michael through his nightmares.

That was the year that Uncle Jim had adopted Michael and his four brothers, after both Uncle Arthur and Aunt Sylvia had died of cancer. He’d written Peter Pan for the five Davies boys when they were smaller and the family came to stay with him at his cottage in Black Lake Woods.

Of the five boys, Michael had been the most beloved for Jim. The boy’s death at the age of nineteen had all but finished him. He had hung on for another twenty years, but he was never the same man, an exhausted spectre waiting to go and join Michael.

The window sash gave a sudden rattle, a cold draught of air. She pulled the dressing gown tighter.

But why should she be dreaming of Michael now, and with such vivid urgency? As if he had some message for her.

For months now, ever since Gertie’s death, she’d had a feeling of life being suspended, everything stale and static. No inspiration, no ideas, no new book to lose herself in. That had never happened to her before.

The first hints of red and green were beginning to bleed back into the shrubs, the black shapes of the trees beyond them moving in the wind. She opened the window, leaned out into the chill air, wanting to be more a part of what was happening outside, and for a moment she had the ridiculous feeling that Rebecca might still be out there, dancing on the lawns, a heartless, disembodied sprite, thumbing her nose and mocking her.

Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca. Would she never be free of her? Daphne had had a string of hit novels since she wrote that damned book, but it was always Rebecca that people wanted to talk about.

The chill was beginning to bite. She hurried back into bed and lay watching the white roses of the faded Victorian wallpaper appearing in the grey light. Midway along the wall a door led through to her husband’s room. What she would love now was to see it open, for Tommy to put his head round it with his old smile, climb into bed beside her. They’d lie back on the pillows and tell each other the funny things that had happened that day, Tommy making her giggle helplessly with his impressions and jokes – like they always used to do. But for the past few years she and Tommy had not shared a bed once.

When he had come home after six years of war service she’d put him in the adjoining room to give him peace to recuperate for a while. She hadn’t meant it to be for ever. She’d assumed they’d come together again in time, share their old passion.

It was a shock when she realized that no such thing was going to happen. Here she was, barely forty and that side of their life was over. It made her feel horribly old and unwanted. And with not a clue as to how to get back the old intimacy.

What if she were to tiptoe over now, turn the handle and sneak in beside him? He’d probably not even wake.

They’d settled into an unsatisfactory status quo, but lately, there’d been an odd, uncomfortable feeling of something approaching, some sort of crisis, waiting just behind her shoulder.

As she lay in the accruing light of early morning, a conversation she had had recently with Michael’s brother Peter came back to her. They’d been having lunch at the Café Royale. As always, they’d ended up talking for hours about family. Incredibly, Peter had suggested that Uncle Jim might have been to blame for Michael’s death.

‘You do realize,’ he’d said, ‘that Uncle Jim wasn’t always the benign influence people assumed he was when he adopted us five boys. Think of it, two of us dead now and two of us clouded over with depression. Only Nico escaped.’ Peter had leaned forward. ‘And you do see, Daphne, that we weren’t the only ones affected by Jim’s morbid mind?’

She hadn’t seen it that way at all. Had no idea what he was driving at. She resolved to quiz Peter about it next time they met up.

She’d always adored Uncle Jim. He wasn’t their real uncle, of course, but Daphne could not remember a time when he hadn’t been part of the family, whispering tales of Peter Pan as if he’d written them only for her. What would she have done without him? He had taken the trouble to encourage her when no one else understood how desperately she wanted to write.

Perhaps she should have stayed alone in her world of books and stories because in the real world it seemed that she left nothing but a trail of damage and regrets behind her.

She could never tell Tommy exactly what she’d done to survive the long, empty years while he was away.

CHAPTER 1

LONDON 1911

Daphne watches Nico tear a bit of paper from the Peter Pan programme and drop it over the edge of the royal box. It twirls down like a tiny feather and lands on the head of a lady below, lodging on her little tiara. Daphne giggles. Nico tears off another bit, gives it to Daphne. She leans over the edge with its ormolu embellishments, ready to drop it on the people in evening dress below, but Michael frowns and shakes his head.

‘You’ll make people look up at us,’ he says.

Daphne takes her hand back. Michael has shrunk down in his seat as if the whole theatre is glaring at them.

Of her five boy cousins, Nico may be nearest to her in age, but it’s Michael with his elfin features and that way he has of seeming to guard a secret from another place that Daphne is most in awe of. She glances behind to see if Mummy has noticed anything but she is chatting with the older cousins, oblivious. The three older boy cousins are almost grown-ups now, George and Peter in white tie and tails, Jack in his naval cadet’s uniform. Peter smiles at her. He’s seen but doesn’t tell Mummy.

Something changes in the air and Daphne realizes that the lights in the theatre are beginning to dim. She feels a prickle of anticipation as the people in the rows below begin to fade away into darkness. The heavy curtains part as if by unseen hands and the brightness of the stage eclipses all else. She can see a nursery spread out below, a large dog very like Uncle Jim’s Porthos trying to herd three children into their beds. She blinks as Daddy comes on to the stage to a round of applause. He’s dressed as if about to go out for the evening but his face has been emphasized with paint, his hair shiny with pomade. He sends Nana the dog off to her kennel outside for barking too much. Daphne’s chest tightens. She knows this is a mistake. Nana can feel that the children are in danger – that Peter Pan is coming. And yet at the same time Daphne’s longing to see him appear.

Her heart gives a jump because there he is, outlined in the window just as the children are falling to sleep. He leaps down into the room in all his brazen glory, dressed in a green tunic and cap, crowing around the nursery because he’s captured his shadow again, then furious and tearful because he can’t stick it back on to the ends of his feet.

Wendy wakes up and helps him sew his shadow back on – as the jealous fairy Tinkerbell rings out angrily in the background. Daphne grips the edge of the box, because the best bit is about to happen. There’s a sprinkling of fairy dust and she’s no longer sure if she’s still sitting in her seat or down on the stage with Peter Pan and the children. She can feel the lightness in her body as her feet leave the stage and she flies through the darkness of the theatre with them, swooping over the lights of London and away into Neverland.

Two hours of adventures pass as quickly as a dream. Daddy appears in Neverland too, only this time he’s a sneering pirate in a red frock coat and curly wig, who gets eaten up by a crocodile – which makes Daphne scream even though she knows it’s coming.

At last, the children fly back to their nursery, Mummy and Daddy and Nana all waiting for them, but when Peter Pan leaves, this time for ever, it’s Peter whom her heart follows as he flies away to a land where children never have to grow up.

The lights come on and she’s shepherded out of the theatre among a moving forest of long skirts, grey trouser legs and polished shoes, dazed by the cold and the hurrying crowds outside, snow falling, cold slush seeping into her satin shoes as she and Angela hold hands and look up into the swirling flakes and Mummy in her fur cape and long dress frets about finding their cab.

Her five cousins wait with them on the pavement, tall and glamorous in their cashmere coats and white opera scarves, the older ones holding top hats. George goes off to find their cab. Nico, and even Michael, put their tongues out to catch the falling snowflakes and Daphne copies them, tasting the drops of coldness that almost seem sweet.

Mummy clucks around the boys as she always does since they have no Mummy or Daddy of their own – are they getting cold? where is that carriage? – in a way that gives Daphne a feeling she can’t name. The same feeling she gets when she sees how Mummy clucks around Baby Jeanne. Mummy never fusses around Daphne in that cosy way. Daphne shivers and Cousin Peter with his long, serious face bends down and wraps his white silk opera scarf around her neck.

Uncle Jim appears from across the street, a small figure in a too-big coat, his bowler hat and shoulders sprinkled with snow, a twinkle in his eye and a drooping moustache.

‘So was it terrible?’ he asks, looking towards Michael.

‘It was awful,’ says Michael, laughing. ‘Worst play ever.’

‘It was wonderful,’ says Daphne indignantly. ‘Didn’t you come in to see it, Uncle Jim?’

‘Jim never comes in to see a first night,’ says Peter. ‘He paces up and down in front of the theatre, smoking, don’t you, Uncle Jim?’

‘That way, I can have a head start on everyone when they chase me down the street wanting their money back.’ She catches a wink from him that no one else sees.

So it’s a joke and she’s in on it.

‘It was magnificent,’ Mummy tells Uncle Jim. ‘It gets better each year.’

‘Well, your opinion means everything, Muriel. I think the changes worked. Tell Gerald I’ll pop by tomorrow afternoon and discuss another idea I had.’

Daphne jumps up and down. ‘And you’ll come and see us in the nursery, Uncle Jim?’

‘Don’t be impertinent, Daphne. Jim’s a busy man. He can’t be expected to entertain you children every time.’

But? Mummy’s wrong. He does have time for her. Daphne and Uncle Jim share many secrets.

Daphne’s had lunch and her boring nap, but still he hasn’t come. She can’t bear to think that he might not come at all. She’s even been taken downstairs in a clean dress, her hair brushed, to say hello to Mummy and curtsey to her friends in the drawing room – ladies in smelly perfume who insist on kissing her. Eight-year-old Angela is good at this – she enjoys charming everyone, shaking hands and smiling – but Daphne hates the way people say how sweet she is, such pretty blonde hair and blue eyes. She stares back at them angrily.

‘Don’t be rude, Daphne. Shake hands with people,’ Mummy hisses in her ear.

Afterwards, Daphne stomps back up to the nursery, longing to be left alone with her books and her toys. She opens the door and stops in surprise. There’s Uncle Jim, sitting on the nursery fender. He looks too small for his crumpled suit, his dome of a forehead gleaming amid a cloud of pipe smoke.

‘Thought I’d sneak up without anyone seeing me, before those fancy women can get me tangled up in their chit-chat.’

Daphne runs across the room and throws herself on him with her biggest hug. And so it begins. Jim and Daphne taking it in turns to spin the story, Daphne brandishing the wooden sword that Uncle Jim gave her as she leads the Lost Boys around the rocking horse, or swims across the floor rug, completely caught up in a breathless dream of pirates and mermaids.

Angela arranges the dolls’ tea set in the corner of the nursery, long dark curls, a neat bow on one side, her pinafore always clean. Older and more sensible than Daphne by three years, she’s the perfect Wendy. Daphne, however, is always and only entirely Peter Pan, fair hair cropped short, the tilt of her little square chin, a challenge in her blue eyes as she flies from island to island, leaping from sofa to chair, until she swoops out of the window in the thick blue air of dusk, gliding out over the rooftops, the gas lamps and the dark trees of Regent’s Park below, the rush of air against her skin.

‘Can you see me flying, Uncle Jim?’

‘Oh yes. That’s the thing about you, Daphne,’ he murmurs in his sing-song Scottish burr. ‘You’re one of the very few children who can remember back to when you were a bird. When you lived on the little island in the middle of the Serpentine where birds turn into babies. All babies start life as birds.’

Daphne pauses on the sofa, reaches down her back, trying to feel her shoulder blade. ‘Yes, and I can still feel the itch on my shoulders where the wings used to be, can’t I?’

‘Ah little Daphne. And you know you were very nearly born a boy back then. Should have been a boy.’

Daphne nods solemnly. There’s nothing better than to be a boy, like Peter Pan or her five cousins. Then she could live with Uncle Jim and the Davies boys in a house filled with jokes and pranks and hallway cricket, nobody minding about the paint, and ping-pong tables and stories told by Uncle Jim.

Sometimes Daddy comes up and joins in before his evening performance, the girls squealing with laughter as he roars round the nursery with his coat-hanger hook and a scarf for an eyepatch. Uncle Jim sits quietly watching, writing in his notebook, deep-set eyes peering out of the fug of tobacco smoke, giving his deep wheezy coughs, so alarming that each one sounds as though it might be his last.

The door opens. Daphne looks up, but it’s not Daddy, only Nurse in her stiff white cap and apron.

‘You girls are taking up quite enough of Mr Barrie’s time. Tea and bath now.’

Uncle Jim taps out his pipe, makes a cheeky face behind Nurse’s back as he disappears through the door and Peter Pan and the Lost Boys begin to fade away, hiding behind the chest of drawers or under the plump sofa.

Well scrubbed, her hair in curl papers, Daphne lies in the bed next to Angela’s and wishes she had been born sooner, when her cousins were as small as she is now, back when they first found Peter Pan in the woods of Black Lake Cottage as they played castaway games with Uncle Jim and his dog Porthos. She’s heard all the stories, how Michael was still a tiny baby then but he was the one who spotted the light of fairy Tinkerbell flying through the evening woods. Back in the days when the boys still had their Mummy and Daddy.

How it came to be that Uncle Jim, who was not a real uncle or even a relative of any sort according to Daddy, had come to adopt the five boys after their parents died, Daphne has never really understood – did he kidnap them? She knew it was something to do with Uncle Jim being so noble and with everyone else in the family being too busy. And something to do with money, she’d heard Mummy say. Jim has a lot of money.

Daphne knows she is lucky, because she still has her own Mummy and Daddy, although she can’t work out why it is she makes Mummy so irritable. Sometimes Daphne has the rather uncomfortable feeling that Mummy doesn’t like her very much. Once, when Mummy was nursing the baby, she got so cross with Daphne – Mummy’s hair down and streaming out like a witch in a peignoir– that Daphne had to run and hide away in the nursery, where she prefers to be with her games and her stories. Or with Daddy who will pick her up and twirl her round, or teach her to play cricket in the garden because Daddy is her best friend, just as she his favourite daughter, the one who was very nearly born a boy.

Daphne wakes early and feels her whole being expand with a sense of freedom. Each summer, Daddy takes a house in the country and this year they are at Slyfield Manor, a Tudor mansion filled with stories. Outside, the lawns and woods and fields are waiting for her. ‘She’s a different child in the country,’ she hears Nanny telling Mummy. And today, best of all, not only will Daddy be coming down for the weekend, but her cousins will also be arriving with Uncle Jim.

No one else is awake, though the sun is streaming through the gap in the curtains. She can’t bear to be inside for a moment longer. She creeps down the stairs, past oil paintings of men in flowing wigs, silk and ruffles. She’s a Cavalier spying out Roundheads, trying to escape the house unseen.

Outside, her summer sandals flapping, her dressing gown a cloak, she picks up a stick from beneath the cedar tree, flies around the lawn with her sword. This is how she will lead Nico and Michael through the woods, pirates together, stalking the enemy.

Daddy arrives after lunch with two pretty actresses in large hats and gauzy dresses. A look of tightness in Mummy’s face. Daphne’s seen that look before, when she’s been naughty.

‘Thought the air here would do the girls some good,’ says Daddy as he kisses Mummy’s cheek.

‘You might have warned me, Gerald,’ says Muriel, glancing over at the girls’ tight yet bosomy dresses. ‘They’ll have to share a room.’

In the quiet of the afternoon, the adults overcome by the summer heat and half-asleep in deckchairs, she finally hears the puttering of a car engine, a sound of scrunched gravel. Running round to the front of the house she sees a brand-new open-top Rolls-Royce in front of the house, the boys and Jim stacked up inside like skittles in a box. They get out, stretching, George towering over Uncle Jim. The cousins are wearing white flannels and cricket sweaters. Uncle Jim a white linen safari suit, a jaunty cricket hat, his droopy moustache covering a small pointed chin. He thanks Daphne for coming to greet them, as if she’s a grown-up.

While the adults are served champagne in coupe glasses, Daphne asks Michael and Nico if they would like to play pirates in the woods. Tells them she has found them all swords from beneath the cedar tree. She’ll be Peter.

‘Sorry, Daphne, we grew out of that guff ages ago,’ says Michael apologetically. A sweet smile in a neat oval face. He climbs up into the swaying branches of the great cedar and settles there, looking out over the garden.

Peter wanders off to the library where he’ll stay all day, looking at books without pictures, one leg over the side of an armchair.

Overcome with disappointment, Daphne feels her eyes prickle. She’ll never be there with the Lost Boys in the castaway woods. They’ve gone and didn’t wait for her.

Nico shrugs. ‘I’ll play with you,’ he says with a cheerful, buck-toothed smile. He follows her through the woods, supposedly looking for a crocodile around the edges of the pond, beating at the reeds with their sticks, but he’s clearly bored, acting like a grown-up playing with a child, she realizes, which stings. And he’s famished, he says. They go back in through the kitchen, sidle into the dim coolness of the larder and munch the gritty seed cake and drink the tart raspberry cordial. They can hear the boys’ old Nanny Hodges talking with Daphne’s Nurse at the kitchen table. The chink of teacups. Daphne’s not sure if they should be listening in.

‘It’s Michael who’s the delicate one, I’d say. Needs watching over closely.’

‘A bad chest?’

‘That yes, but the real worry is how he’s plagued by terrible nightmares,’ says Nanny Hodges, lowering her voice. ‘Mr Jim will insist on filling their heads with the sort of nonsense that’s just not suitable for children. He’s not a man who understands what’s good for a child.’

Nanny pours more tea.

‘But he’s so devoted to them.’

Nanny Hodges huffs. ‘Those boys go out to dine at the Savoy with him all the time. Even Nico. Imagine. No idea of the real world.’

Daphne hears her nurse sniff disapprovingly. ‘There’s them who have money to burn. . .’

Nico disappears when the cake is gone. Daphne creeps back outside and finds Uncle Jim sitting alone in a deckchair, writing in his notebook.

He looks up, stops writing when he sees her. Smiles his wry smile. ‘You look like look someone in need of company.’ He takes her by the hand and they walk towards the edge of the gardens where the woods begin. He starts a captivating story: a girl who knew that she was really a pirate.

‘Would you like to see my favourite place?’ Daphne says in a whisper. ‘Where I pretend I’m Peter Pan in Neverland.’

‘Oh, I think you do more than pretend, my little Daphne.’

They reach an oval disk of muddy water reflecting the sombre browns and dull greens of the encroaching trees. Tangled roots and branches overhang the water. Seeing it through Uncle Jim’s eyes, Daphne feels disappointed for her magic lake. But Uncle Jim nods approvingly.

‘Yes. It would have been very like this, the lake in Neverland.’

‘It’s a shame there’s no island in the middle, though.’

‘I think there is,’ he says slowly in his quiet lilt. ‘If you half-shut your eyes now, there, can’t you see it, your own island, ever so slowly, rising from the water?’

After a moment, she nods.

‘And if you concentrate, but not too hard mind, can’t you make out people there, little figures, growing clearer?’ His Scots accent sounds even more sing-song that usual, slow and soporific.

‘I think can. Uncle Jim, I can see them. And look, it’s me there.’

‘There you are indeed. You see, little Daphne, any time you like, you can half-close your eyes, think about the water in that drowsy way, and sooner or later your island will appear. It’s a secret very few people know.’

Feeling happy, she walks back across the lawns towards the house, still holding Uncle Jim’s hand.

‘Uncle Jim, when I grow up, do you think I can write stories like you do, all day long?’

He nods, as if thinking carefully about what she had said. ‘I’m sure you can. You know, your grandfather George du Maurier wrote books. He wrote a story about mesmerism that was very famous in its day.’

‘What’s mesmerism?’

‘A sort of magic spell that grown-ups practise. ’

‘And he wrote stories in books?’

‘Oh yes. And it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if you’d inherited the special du Maurier gift from him. But we won’t tell anyone else. They’d be jealous.’

At night, Slyfield Manor is a more worrying place. The wooden corridors and bedrooms crack and stir with the footsteps of figures that walk out of the oil paintings and into Daphne’s dreams.

In the middle of the night she’s startled awake, someone shouting. A thin boyish voice filled with alarm. Her heart jumping, she goes out on to the landing. A slender white figure is standing at the top of the stairs, waving an arm to and fro, as if holding a sword. It’s Michael, shouting at ghosts again. She startles to see a little goblin nearby in the dark, eyes hollowed out, a white forehead. It’s only Uncle Jim, she realizes. He tiptoes over to her in the darkness. Whispers to her that they mustn’t wake Michael because he’s sleepwalking.

‘You won’t get me,’ Michael cries out, his eyes open and glassy. He screams and Daphne jumps. ‘Water’s rising.’ He slashes the dark air with his imaginary sword. ‘Can’t breathe. Let go. They’re pulling me down.’

Peter comes out. He and Uncle Jim take hold of Michael gently, slowly lead him back to his room, a small jabbering ghost.

‘You should go back to bed,’ Peter whispers.

The next morning, Daphne wonders if she dreamed it all. But when she peeps into Michael’s room she sees Uncle Jim in his dressing gown, sitting in the armchair by the bed as if he has been there all night, which, she realizes, he has.

Michael stirs. Lifts his head up and sees Uncle Jim reading the newspaper as if all was perfectly normal.

‘Was I at it again then?’ he asks.

‘’Fraid so.’

‘What am I going to do when I go to Eton?’ asks Michael.

‘I shall send you a letter every day that will be so boring, you will read it and sleep like a top.’

‘Thank you, Uncle Jim. I’ll write back to you.’

When Michael comes down to breakfast, his heart-shaped face is the colour of chalk, dark shadows beneath his grey eyes. Michael reminds Daphne of the photo in a silver frame at home, of the boys’ mother, Sylvia, who died the year Daphne was born, the same small pointed face and dark hair, the same half-dreaming expression with its suggestion of a secret world.

Michael asks the maid for toast and jam, but Jim says he should have bacon and a boiled egg first, which Michael sits and stares at, barely touches. Sighing, Jim slides the bacon on to his own plate and pushes the jam and toast towards Michael.

Most of the day is given over to cricket, everyone roped in except Mummy, even the two actresses who spend a lot of time applauding George – though all the Davies boys are excellent at cricket. It’s a very hot day. As the heat mounts, Daddy suggests a swim for the young people in the pool.

Daphne can feel the squish of mud between her toes, the sticks and the debris that have fallen from the trees and sunk to the bottom as she wades tentatively into cool water the colour of stewed tea. Daddy helps her swim, holding her as she kicks her legs and soaks him, both laughing.

‘Aren’t you coming in, old boy?’ Daddy shouts towards the bank.

Daphne looks back and sees Michael clutching his knees. Still in his cricket whites.

‘I can give you a lesson. Look, even Daphne’s almost swimming.’

But Michael won’t be persuaded. He shakes his head. The next time Daphne looks, Michael is gone.

CHAPTER 2

STANWAY HOUSE 1920

It should have been a glorious day, deep-blue sky with butterflies appearing and disappearing, the smell of cut grass mixing with the warm air, but fourteen-year-old Daphne sits confined to a deckchair next to Angela, Jeanne and Mummy, watching Nico and his Eton friends rush up and down in their white trousers, white shirts sleeves rolled up, the thrilling crack of the ball on the bat. Across the field, the small figure of Jim sitting on a shooting stick, umpiring the match.

Daphne is rather good at cricket, but she isn’t allowed to join in with the boys today, with all Nico’s friends from Eton. Being a girl, Daphne is beginning to realize, is simply a set of betrayals.

Not only that, but she and Angela have to wear stockings and heels for the weekend, which puts a damper on being invited somewhere as grand as the Asquiths’ Tudor mansion, the sort of house that Daphne would have loved to wander around as a child, back when each morning held a hundred possibilities of magic.

There’s a shout and people stand to clap.

Cynthia announces that tea is ready. The boys begin to pick up their sweaters and head for the honey-stone gables and chimneys of Stanway House. The ladies and girls follow.

There’s a small car parked in front of the entrance. Jim’s face lights up with a hopeful joy. Michael is standing next to the car. Another boy by his side, tall, a pleasant face. ‘You remember Rupert, Uncle Jim?’

‘It’s a wonderful car, Sir Jim.’

Jim gives him a curt nod, turns away to speak to Michael. ‘Well, what do you think? Should make it easier to get home at the weekend.’

‘She’s beautiful, Uncle Jim.’

As Michael unloads a bag from the boot, Daphne runs round to give him a hug.

‘Hello, cousin.’

‘I didn’t think you were coming this weekend.’

‘Don’t tell Jim yet, but we won’t be staying long. We’re motoring down to Dorset in the morning.’

After supper they play a game that Jim has invented, a cross between shuffle penny and ping-pong. Daphne notices that Jim and Michael have disappeared. She leaves the boisterous noise of the games and creeps away to explore the passages and rooms of the house. She hears familiar voices coming from the library.

‘Art and music are good as hobbies, Michael, but you need a solid degree.’

‘But art and music are the only things that make life worth living, Jim. I don’t expect you to understand but—’

‘Yes, yes, I know I’m a Philistine when it comes to such things, a dull old wordsmith, but I can’t let you throw it all up to go to Paris and paint. Oxford opens doors. You could be anything, Michael. I was going to tell you later, but I may as well tell you now. I’ve put a small house in your name, a cottage really, near Oxford. It’s yours. And with the car you can use it as much as you like to get away from Oxford at the weekends. If you’re at Oxford. Don’t say anything now. It’s getting late. We can talk about it in the morning.’

‘I meant to say, sorry. Rupert and I will be off first thing. We’re driving down to Dorset.’

‘You’re leaving?’

There’s a tone of desperation in Jim’s voice that makes Daphne feel that she shouldn’t be listening.

In the morning, they stand on the steps and wave Michael and Rupert off. She notices that Jim has not spoken one more word to Michael’s friend since he arrived. Walked past him as if he didn’t exist. As with most of Michael’s friends. Which is puzzling, and a very odd way for a grown-up to behave.

The following year, as spring is about to become summer, fifteen-year-old Daphne and ten-year-old Jeanne have developed a craze for playing cricket in the garden, wearing shorts and shirts. They are, Daphne says, two schoolboys at Harrow, Eric and David. One day they will go to university and then out into the world. They’re good at everything, could go anywhere they like – being boys.

The windows of the house are open in the warm air, the clack of the ball on the bat, Daphne running backwards to catch it. Suddenly, they hear a bellowing from the drawing-room window. Daddy. An anguished sound that breaks the air in two. They race to the house in alarm. Find Daddy sitting by the phone, head in hands.

Michael is dead. Drowned in Sanford Pool.

‘That man,’ moans Daddy. ‘I should never have left the boys, my own nephews, with that man.’

CHAPTER 3

HAMPSTEAD 1926

Early morning in the loft above the garage at the bottom of the garden. Daphne had claimed the little attic as her own after she got back from finishing school in Paris. She loved the quiet around her, a few watery notes from a blackbird outside, the scratch of her pen on the paper. She even loved the ink’s chemical smell, mixed in as it was with a faint whiff of rubber shoes since the loft was used as a changing room in summer for tennis parties. In front of her, a slim notebook with green leather covers and marbled endpapers. ‘To write whatever you want,’ Jim had said as she had flicked through the blank pages. ‘With as many crossings-out as you want. One must be brutal.’

She certainly had plenty of crossings-out.

She hadn’t told Daddy whom the notebook came from. She never told Daddy when she was going out to meet dear old Uncle Jim for tea any more, pretending she was going shopping. Ever since the telegram came with the news that had broken everybody’s hearts, almost killed Uncle Jim, Daddy had forbidden the girls from seeing Jim on their own – as if the tragedy of Michael’s drowning was somehow contagious. Daddy and Peter had supported Jim through the worst times, but ever since Michael died, Daddy had tried to pull away from Uncle Jim.

Daddy had set up his own theatre company as an actor manager, refused to work for Uncle Jim any more, although after a few years, the company struggling, Daddy had had to go back and ask if he could put on one of Jim’s plays. With a Barrie smash hit in production, Daddy soon went back to making as much money as before. But it still wasn’t like the old days, with Jim popping in cheerfully after rehearsals.

Daddy kept Jim at arm’s length, for reasons Daphne couldn’t quite understand.

Poor Uncle Jim, so broken since the loss of Michael, an old man overnight. She sneaked out regularly to have teas with him.

She’d always counted Uncle Jim as one of her dearest friends. He gave her advice and encouragement, the only one who understood that she had to write.

She needed to talk to him now about a new story she’d begun brewing, set among Daddy’s theatre people. They came for lunch and champagne every Sunday. A glamorous set, filled with sparkling gossip about each other, but if you listened in to what they were actually saying, their affairs and the secrets, it all seemed rather sordid and shabby. Of course, she wouldn’t describe anyone by name. Imagine the scandal. As Uncle Jim had said, the trick was to use real people more as a kind of hook upon which one could hang one’s imagined version of them.

She heard footsteps on the wooden stairs leading up from the garden. Angela came in.

‘Mummy’s taking us to Selfridges. Says she wants to make an early start.’

Daphne groaned. ‘Why is it that every time I sit down to write someone has to come and drag me away?’

‘Well, thank you. I for one think it’s rather pleasant to go to Selfridges to buy new dresses for my debutante ball,’ said Angela in mock offence.

‘Sorry, Piffy. You’re right. But honestly, is it a sin for a du Maurier to not want to join in everything? All I hear is, “What’s wrong with Daphne, always wanting to be alone. . .”’

‘You always did spend your day in one of those terrific daydreams as a child, making us all act it out. Those plasticine pustules for the bubonic plague. Shame one has to grow up, old thing.’

Jammed in between Mummy and Angela in the back of the Packard, Daphne stared at the traffic ahead. She knew Angela was right: most girls would be more than grateful to go to Oxford Street and buy all the dresses they wanted, to live in a splendid Georgian pile in Hampstead, go to balls at Claridge’s, but lately Daphne had begun to wake in the night gasping for breath, a feeling of being swaddled with layers of thick black cloth – with no escape from the path set out by one’s very Edwardian mother, days filled with girdles and garters, with tight hats and tight shoes, and with dull conversations with dull people, until she got engaged and married to someone suitable and had to spend her days worrying about whether the bacon at breakfast was overdone or if her husband had enough collar studs.

An anguished cry of ‘Stop!’ came from Mummy. The car braked and Daphne slid forward in her seat. Mummy was staring out of the side window, her beaded bag clutched in both hands as if it might save her. Daphne followed her gaze, felt her cheeks flush.

Across the road was a white stucco house that she knew belonged to Daddy’s latest leading lady, a rather fun and pretty actress called Maude Acre. In front of the house was parked Daddy’s unmistakable maroon car– at nine-thirty in the morning. Clearly it had been there all night. Daddy might as well have put up a giant noticeboard declaring his latest affair.

Daphne looked away. It was horribly embarrassing. Of course, Daddy’s string of girlfriends was an open secret, but all was well and stayed well so long as Mummy was allowed to act as though she knew nothing. Gerald would come home to his darling wife after the evening performance – unless there was something he had to sort out since he was not only the leading actor but also the director – and Mummy would be waiting in her Japanese housecoat to cook him his favourite bacon and eggs. Gerald never stopped declaring, loudly and often, how dearest Muriel was his everything. How he’d be lost without her. Adored her.

‘Should I park here, Lady du Maurier?’ Allan the driver asked, looking at her enquiringly in the rear-view mirror.

‘We’ll carry on, thank you, Allan,’ Mummy’s voice icily calm.

At Selfridges Mummy swept through the doors, stoutly elegant in her embroidered linen coat and wide-brimmed hat, Angela and Daphne following behind, pulling alarmed faces at each other.

Mummy took shopping very seriously. Elegance such as Lady du Maurier’s did not simply happen. Seated on a silk sofa in the ladies’ dressing room she looked critically at Daphne who was standing in front of a floor-length mirror in an under-slip, a blue velvet dress in one hand and a black shantung jacket and trousers in the other.

‘Daphne, you simply can’t wear trousers to a coming-out do at Claridge’s.’

Daphne held the blue dress under her chin once again, staring glumly at her reflection. The sales assistant put her hands together and gave a bright smile.

‘The dress does work very well with Miss du Maurier’s fair hair and blue eyes.’ She took her tape measure and nipped it around Daphne’s waist. ‘Especially since one is so slim. One could even consider a smaller size since it is the latest fashion to have a boyish figure.’

While Mummy consulted with the sales girl, Daphne took the chance to hold up the black satin suit once more, her small, square chin defiant. If she shingled her hair in that daring new way, then she’d be a blonde version of the deliciously dangerous actress, Molly Kerr.

She heard a loud sniff of disapproval behind her, turned to see Mummy’s cold stare.

‘The velvet dress will be lovely. Thank you, Mummy,’ said Daphne, stifling a sigh.

Angela came out from the fitting room, a sturdy meringue in a cream satin dress, her dark hair dishevelled from trying on so many frocks.

‘What do you think? I hate it. Do you think it will do?’

‘Definitely the nicest yet,’ said Mummy. ‘With a few tweaks, I think it will do very well.’

‘They’ll all want to dance with Daphne anyway.’ No bitterness, just a statement of fact.

‘Nonsense,’ said Daphne, though she had noticed the need to steer boys towards Angela at parties. ‘You’re the one who knows how to get on with people. No one sweeter than you.’

Another hour trailing around Selfridges – Daddy needed ties, socks. Then coffee and cake in the hum of the tearooms before the boxes were piled into the car.

When they passed Maud Acre’s house, Daddy’s car was gone.

Mummy went straight to her room with a migraine. She came down later to have supper with the three girls, looking older and strained.

Usually Daphne was completely on Daddy’s side, but lately she had begun to feel a conflict in her loyalties, let down by him for hurting Mummy in this shabby, careless way. If only she could say something to make Mummy see that she understood how hard it must be.

‘I think,’ Daphne began as the soup was served, ‘that if people were simply honest instead of pretending. . . I mean, the way that Daddy behaves, I think—’

Daphne jumped as Mummy banged the table with both hands.

‘Don’t ever speak about things you know nothing about.’ Daphne had never seen Mummy so furious, such cold hate in her eyes. Her mother swept out of the room.

Angela rolled her eyes. Jeanne, Mummy’s pet, stared down at her plate, pushed a long plait behind her shoulder, then got up. ‘I’d better go and see if Mummy’s all right.’

Feeling for ever destined to say the wrong thing when it came to Mummy, Daphne escaped back to her loft above the garage. She sat down at the table, too unsettled to write. She had thought she was long used to Mummy not liking her particularly, always shrugged it off, and yet if you prodded there was always that gap in her soul that felt sore and empty – a lack that even Daddy’s outright adoration for his favourite girl couldn’t fill.

She shook her head, wrote a short paragraph. Read it back. The writing seemed stilted and puerile. Put a line through everything she’d written.

The truth was that she couldn’t begin to write when she felt so angry with Mummy. How could Mummy bear to collude with Daddy’s secrets like that, pretending not to see – as if Mummy had made her whole life about Gerald and what Gerald needed? His welfare the only thing that filled her head. Daphne was never going to end up like that.

And to think that Mummy had once had her own career as an actress – until she and Daddy were stranded together on a desert island, night after night plus matinees, in one of Uncle Jim’s plays, The Admirable Crichton. You could say that Jim had scripted her parents to fall in love beneath the bright stage lights, Gerald with his boyish face and expressive blue eyes, pink-cheeked Muriel with her sweet smile and cloud of blonde hair. A year later they were married. Another year and Angela was born, Uncle Jim her godfather. Then Daphne, then Jeanne had arrived.

But now, when Daphne looked at the photograph of Mummy as a young woman in a silk dress, staring directly into the camera with an impish smile, it was hard to believe this was the same woman. Where had that confident young actress gone? Was it a rule that a woman must be subsumed by marriage, even when they married someone as lovely as Daddy?

Daphne already knew that she was never going to get married. She fully intended to keep her freedom and write as much as wanted, undisturbed. But here was the conundrum: to be left alone enough to write, then she needed to make her own money, but the only way she could see for her to earn enough money herself was to be published. A real author, earning like a man did. Yet here she was with another day gone by and she’d written nothing worth keeping.

Of course, the allowance from Daddy was generous, but it came with strings. She couldn’t face ending up like Angela, always running out of money at the end of the month and worrying what Mummy would think about what she had spent it on.